Newsbrief: A team of game industry veterans has revealed PlayCanvas, a cloud-hosted platform for HTML5 game creation that aims to solve numerous complexities within the HTML5 technology.

PlayCanvas was founded by Will Eastcott, formerly technical director at Activision and product manager for Criterion's RenderWare middleware, and Dave Evans, one of the founding members of Sony's PlayStation Home team.

The team has been working on PlayCanvas since early 2011, and has now launched it as a closed beta. Eastcott explained that, while the potential for HTML5 development is definitely there, developers are currently being held back by a lack of proper tools. With PlayCanvas, he hopes to change that.